A few useful change to improve our release/distribution cycle:

• compile manylinux wheels (see Compile manylinux wheels #188)
• set up CI to directly upload wheels to PyPI
• include Makefile to automise release workflow (see this intro, also see e.g. https://github.com/alan-turing-institute/CleverCSV/blob/master/make_release.py)
• enforce code formatting in released code (see Black formatting #208, Enforce linting #256)
• add coverage for unit tests (see Update CI and maintenance tools #394)
• add code quality/climate checks (see https://lgtm.com, https://www.codacy.com, https://github.com/marketplace/code-climate, etc)
• consider cibuildwheel package to simplify wheel building across platforms
• improve packaging for macOS wheels with delocate, also included in cibuildwheel, also see https://iscinumpy.gitlab.io/post/azure-devops-python-wheels/
• distribute sktime via conda-forge: https://conda-forge.org/#contribute (see Conda-Forge recipe request #326)
• set up pre-commit config (see Update CI and maintenance tools #394)
• add Black for code formatting (see Update CI and maintenance tools #394)
• add check-manifest (see Update CI and maintenance tools #394)
• add bugbear to flake8 (see Update CI and maintenance tools #394)
• update setup.cfg, see e.g. https://github.com/scikit-hep/boost-histogram/blob/develop/setup.cfg (see Update CI and maintenance tools #394)
• check out other flake8 extensions
• add checks for broken website links: https://fastpages.fast.ai/fastlinkcheck/
• use GitHub Action to check if Binder works and pre-build Docker images for quicker launch: https://github.com/jupyterhub/repo2docker-action#use-github-actions-to-cache-the-build-for-binderhub
• explore pre-commit-ci as suggested in Upgrade nbqa #794

Extra resources

• For building/distribution on GitHub Actions checkout: https://scikit-hep.org/developer/gha_wheels
• Useful links from reproducible research lunch
• scikit-learn's release process
• Check out https://python-poetry.org thanks to @hiqbal2
• Consider setuptools_scm for versioning (software configuration management)